Hal Clement - Noise

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Noise

NOISE

Also by Hal Clement

Half Life

Heavy Planet

logo.jpg

www.ebookyes.com

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are

used fictitiously.

NOISE

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 0-312-71099-2

First Edition: September 2003

To Tania Ruiz,

who came up with the coral

when the pumice refused to form

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Acknowledgments

Principal thanks go to the writer’s group that, I understand, has been named “Hal’s Pals” by Harlan

Ellison. They have listened, suggested, criticized, encouraged. The membership has been rather variable

over the years, but Sherry Briggs, Mona Wheeler, Greg and Anne Warner, Tania Ruiz, Matt Jarpe, and

Wendy Spencer have all had their say in this particular Enterprise (pun inappropriate but intended). I

don’t keep a log of the meetings and hope I haven’t forgotten anyone. If I have, I apologize; I do notice

that as the years go by the insulation is getting frayed.

Other fans who have listened at conventions to a chapter here and a chapter there and have added their

comments can’t be named here because I don’t know most of their names, but I am most grateful to them

also.

HALCLEMENT

Milton, Massachusetts

March 2003

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

I Overture

II Discords

III Score

IV Crescendo

V Quality

VI Amplitude

VII Glissando

VIII Orchestration

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IX Interference

X Impedance

XI Overtones

XII Echo

NOISE

Prologue

Theme.

“You still say these folks don’t have a Chamber of Commerce?” Mike Hoani made no effort to hide his

skepticism.

“Right. There’s no native life that anyone had found the last I knew, but they’ve plenty of experience with

pseudolife design; cities, ships, life-support equipment, are all grown just as they are at home. Their

offworld trade is mostly specialized seeds, which don’t fill freighter holds very well. They haven’t much

to offer to tourists; when you’ve seen one mist-shrouded floating city and a few square kilos of misty

ocean with no city, you’ve pretty well covered the scenery. Most of the people I’ve met there seem

friendly enough to visitors, though you may meet exceptions of course, but a few generations in one-third

gee means they can’t do much visiting themselves.”

“So it’s just coincidence we popped into real space just where and just when we could see two eclipses at

once?” Mike nodded at the screen. “You don’t get a small honorarium for arranging that, after we set

down?”

Hi-Vac’s navigator didn’t answer at once. She, too, was staring at the image. The two partly overlapped

stellar disks didn’t quite blend with each other; an M5 sun is enough cooler than an M4 to let even the

human eye detect its lower surface brightness, especially when the cooler one is closer to the viewer and

partially covering its twin. The double planets’ images, similarly overlapped, were less informative; they

were not quite in the same direction as the suns, and showed only thin crescents, one half erased by its

twin’s shadow.

“If I’d set it up,” the navigator remarked at length, “I’d have composed the picture better. Everything is

practically in a straight line. A million kilometers or sothat way”—her thumb gestured toward the lower

left corner of the screen—“would have made it an artistic presentation.”

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Mike, who was not an artist, made no comment. Intellectually, he knew that there was no disgrace in not

being an expert at practically everything, but he was still a touch neurotic about displaying his own

ignorance. The navigator, after a moment’s silence, went on.

“It wouldn’t be much of a problem, of course. There’s a huge locus of positions from which you can see

both pairs, sun and planets, in eclipse at once, and the periods of both are short enough, goodness knows.

The chances of popping into real space and being greeted by a view like this are pretty good.”

Mike nodded, somewhat doubtfully.“I suppose so. Which of those crescents is Kainui? And where do we

land?”

“I don’t know, to both questions. Kainui’s just a little bit the larger, but from here I can’t tell by eyeball.

Muamoku is the only place we can set down, at least usefully, but it’ll take time to find it.”

“You don’t have a chart of some sort? Aren’t there guide beacons?”

“You haven’t learned much about the place, have you? No, I don’t have a chart. Neither do the people

who live there. Both planets are water worlds, though Kaihapa hasn’t been settled. Only the polar ice caps

and the equatorial permanent rain belt can be distinguished from space, they’re not too clear with all the

haze, and wouldn’t help anyway with the longitude problem. The cities float; they don’t stay put. Why are

you going there, anyway? I thought anyone would learn something about a world before starting an

expensive trip to it.”

“Research, and I’m not paying the freight. I care more about the people than their planet. I know several

of the alleged reasons why they left Earth; for example, a lot of Polynesians got tired of the way oil-

processing pseudolife stations were crowding the Pacific. There was never a war over the matter, just a lot

of very expensive legal squabbling. I don’t know why they picked Kainui, even though it’s all ocean; it’s

not an ocean you can swim in safely, I’ve heard, though I don’t know why. We know, we think, how

many ships went there originally, but we don’t know how many arrived safely and succeeded in growing

cities. Only one place, Muamoku, seems willing to spend energy on a landing beacon, so it’s the only

place where ships can set down and expect to be in reach of anyone who can talk, buy, or sell. Whatever

other cities there are seem quite willing to let Muamoku act as middleman in any off-planet trading. I’m a

historical linguist by training and taste, and I’m looking for information on language evolution. All the

original ships—that we know of, at least—left Earth from various Polynesian islands. We know the times

they started out. Some people think there’ll be only one language by now, but I doubt it. That has to be

affected by how much and in what ways the cities have been in contact with each other—trading, war,

religious difference, what have you. I’m reasonably fluent in a dozen Polynesian languages, especially

Maori and Tahitian, and should be able to figure out at least something of what’s happened, and when,

and maybe even to whom.”

“Brute information, you mean?”

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“Normal human curiosity, I’d call it.”

“Well, don’t go swimming. That’s something I do know.”

“Why not? Ocean acid, or something?”

“Yes, as it happens, but that’s not the main problem. There’s continuous seismic activity at the ocean

bottom, and if you swim without armor you’re lucky to last five minutes without suffering the fate of a

dynamited fish. There’s enough carbon monoxide in the air to kill you in minutes, enough carbon dust to

hinder visual communication seriously, and enough ionized haze to block practically any e-m

communication. A lot of my friends think they picked that world because no one else would want it.

There must be some reason they don’t get rid of the CO—even I can think of pseudolife genera able to do

that in a few decades. You’re a historian, you say; maybe you can find out while you’re poking around.”

The navigator stopped talking and began to manipulate controls.

Three-quarters of an hour later,Hi-Vac was hovering two thousand kilometers above the surface of the

larger planet. As promised, a fairly bright reflecting belt and a roughly circular patch of white ninety

degrees from it gave locations for the permanent rain and ice regions. The blurred reflection of the suns

was no help; its position on the disk told about whereHi-Vac was orbiting but gave no information about

anything on Kainui’s liquid surface. Mike couldn’t tell by eye whether he was looking at water or fog; he

might or might not be seeing surface. The ship, under power of course, was slowly circling the planet at

about thirty degrees south latitude, so the north polar cap was not visible.

More and more of the night hemisphere was coming into view, and proved, while much darker than the

daylit part, to be much brighter than geometry would have suggested.

“Lightning,” remarked the navigator without taking her attention from her work.

“Shouldn’t it be sort of flickering?” asked Mike.

“When we’re closer and can see separate storms.”

“When can we communicate? You haven’t tried to use radio yet.”

“We can’t. The lightning hashes up everything electromagnetic up to near infrared; radio, even FM, is

nothing but noise out to half a million kilometers. The permanent haze is charged enough to take care of

most shorter waves. Only Muamoku maintains a reasonably high-powered set of laser beams aimed

almost vertically, but we have to find those ourselves. I hope the place hasn’t drifted too far north or

south. Guiding people like us in to where they are is not their highest priority, and if storms knock them

off latitude they don’t always hurry back. The city isn’t very maneuverable, after all, and there aren’t

many scheduled arrivals from outside. We’re lucky having even one city that’s willing to do it at all.

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They—look! RS-455 on the screen! There they are!”

It must have been a battery of lasers, not just one; the luminous spot below was changing color as the ship

moved. At first the signal was brilliant blue; then it was green, then yellow. Then it shifted back to green,

and the navigator altered course and speed slightly. The yellow returned and became orange, started

toward shorter wavelengths again, but was finally brought to deep red by more control work.

“Now we let straight down, but try to see the city before we land on it,” was the remark.

“Whatdo we land on?” Mike asked naturally.

“Ocean. Don’t worry, we’ll float.” “Is there tube connection, or do we moor securely enough for that?”

“We don’t. You’ll need a suit.”

“But why—?”

“They’ll probably tell you, but you may not believe it. I’m a ship-driver, not a historian, but I’ll bet you’ll

get a different reason for colonizing the place in every city you visit, if you take in any others, ranging

from the moral imperative not to displace alien life, through the right to practice human sacrifice freely, to

the simple urge to get away from Earth’s legal systems. Probably different groups did have different

reasons. I’m going by experience on other colony worlds I’ve seen, by the way; I haven’t asked this

crowd. I’ve only been here three or four times. Use a rigid suit until you’re used to the pressure, and start

getting ready. If you have recording equipment, keep a close eye on it. The people are as honest on Kainui

as anywhere else, but silicon is more valuable here than iridium or platinum. They can get all the metals

they need from the ocean, but silicon doesn’t dissolve to speak of in acid.”

“I suppose I ought to watch out for oddball diseases, too,” Mike remarked rather bitterly.

“Only if the colonists have produced them in their own bodies or labs. Evolution presumably moved in

with the people, but no one’s found any native life here, big or little. And you’ll need to practice walking

in the local gee.”

“You said something about that before. Why? I thought you said Kainui was only a little bigger than

Earth.”

“Fifteen percent larger radius. One-third—notone-third greater—surface gravity. Most of the world’s

volume is water, I think saltier than Earth’s, but still water. Ocean depth is about twenty-nine hundred

kilometers.”

“So no islands.”

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“Not real ones. Ice still floats. Don’t bother me for a few minutes. Red is the core of this landing signal,

and I want a touch of orange. Landing right on the place would make us unpopular. Check your suit

carefully; you’ll have to get to the city by boat. Outside pressure is high, and if you have leaks they’ll let

more carbon monoxide in than oxygen out.”

The landing was professional;Hi-Vac settled into the water three hundred meters from the nearest part of

Muamoku, so the city itself, if not its details, could be seen. Its more distant parts were lost in the mist, so

Mike couldn’t even guess at its size.

Overture.

Poetically and almost literally, Kainui’s mantle is at endless war with its overlying ocean. Perhaps they

are simply too intimate; they confront each other directly, with no identifiable intervening crust. The

underside of the interface is not quite liquid most of the time; the upper is technically gas, since the ocean

at that depth is far above water’s critical temperature.

What pass for tectonic plates, from township to county size, are solid enough to crack and tilt and be

carried as individual units by mantle convection. Tsunamis are generated constantly, sometimes by abrupt

plate shifts—quakes—sometimes by vulcanism, though there is nothing at all like a Terrestrial volcano on

the world.

When magma emerges from the mantle to become lava and meets the sea there is of course violence, but

Kainui has never experienced a Krakatoa-type steam blast. The weight of twenty-eight hundred

kilometers of water, nearly all of it far saltier than any Earth ocean, provides some eighty thousand

atmospheres of pressure. A few hundred kelvins rise in temperature has no real effect on either phase or

volume.

So when, one day, a tenth of a cubic kilometer of glowing liquid silicate was suddenly exposed to ocean

bottom along the line between two spreading plates, the result was merely a linear-source sound wave.

Its front spread out as wave fronts do, trying to become flatter and flatter as it left its source behind. It

failed miserably. It passed through layers of differing salinity, temperature, and tonnage of suspended

matter. Sometimes locally it turned concave and was focused so narrowly as almost to regain its original

pressure. Sometimes it diverged, but its total energy degraded only gradually toward heat.

Nearly an hour later, when parts of it were nearing the ocean surface, that energy had been distributed

over much of the planet, but there were still local, focused, high-pressure regions. Now the background

pressure was getting low enough to let the water molecules move noticeablywith the front.

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When it actually reached the next real interface, between ocean and atmosphere, the water—long since

actually liquid—was able to rise, and a tsunami was born. Most of it was imperceptible to human senses,

since it covered a large area and had no coast to overwhelm; but even in the last few kilometers there had

been some local refraction. In several places smaller microtsunamis originated, and Mike Hoani was very

aware of one of these.

Its bulge was three or four hundred meters across and perhaps twenty above the general sea level, but this

was not itself an easily spotted reference. TheMalolo ’s upward acceleration was only barely noticeable to

anyone on board, but her tilt was another matter.

Mike had been trying to get his sea legs for two days now, since his first and last real view of a local

tsunami. That had been during launch, when either the arm supporting the dock had been swinging

downward or Muamoku had been rising. Cities were massive enough to respond rather slowly to changes

in ambient pressure. The ship was different.

Ocean swells, on the rare occasions that they were the only disturbances present, Mike could usually

handle; if they were too long-waved to see, they were, under Kainui’s one-third Earth gravity, too slow to

be a problem. The sometimes strangely shaped and always unpredictable microtsunamis, analogous to the

streaks of light focused on the bottom of a washbasin when the water is stirred, were quite another matter;

he didn’t merely lose his footing, he was often thrown from it.

The catamaran’s deck was railed in many places and rigged with safety lines in most of the rest, but not

continuously or everywhere; the need to dive overboard or climb back was random in both time and place.

It was wet, since there was enough wind to break wave tops and provide spray. It was slippery. This time

Mike slid.

He was not hurt, being encased in sound armor fifteen centimeters thick except near joints, but he was

frightened. Surprising both himself and the witnesses, however, he did the right thing. He swung the

helmet hinged between his shoulders forward over his head, latched it, andthen grasped at a passing line.

He managed to catch this and stop his slide before actually going overboard. The deck was still rocking,

and without shame he crawled away from its edge before trying to regain his feet.

Even the child at the masthead was watching him, lookout duty ignored for the moment, and the three

native faces showed expressions of approval around their breathing masks. Maybe all four, counting Mike

himself, were thinking that this Hoani fellow mightn’t be too much of a burden after all, but nobody said

anything. Especially Mike. He just stood up, carefully.

A mere day later, that particular wave had long gone to warm the surface water and the air above it.

Mike’s reflexes had improved even in that time, and he had some attention to spare now when the

lookout’s shrill voice sounded from above. It was hard to distinguish words over the endless thunder, but

he followed them fairly well.

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“I’a’uri!One hand, port bow, half a kilo, past ripe!” The captain’s response was a wave, and Keokolo at

the tiller simply changed heading. The breathing leaf had not yet been deployed that morning, and

steering was straightforward. Mike, guided by the child’s words, made out a dark-colored patch of what

might have been seaweed in the indicated direction. It seemed more than a hundred meters across. He

assumed it was a sample of the pseudolife they had come to harvest, but it meant nothing specific to him

until afterMalolo had been brought to at its edge.

Even then he could make out no real details, except that the weed seemed to be growing on something

clear suspended a meter or so under the surface.

At that point both adult crew members expressed approval of ’Ao’s judgment. She had descended from

the mast without orders and was waiting with just a faint expression of anxiety visible around her mask.

The passenger, who had a youngster of his own on Earth, could interpret this; the child had been afraid of

being wrong. She relaxed visibly at the captain’s words.

Mike Hoani couldn’t quite decide whether he should be surprised or not. None of the crew had seemed to

be, and it was reasonable that the youngster would be the first to spot thei’a’uri , whatever that was, since

she spent much of her waking time at the masthead; but like Mike she was on her first sortie. Unlike him,

she was barely forty years old and still carried her doll even on duty.

Her ability not only to identify thei’a’uri but to give details seemed to say more about Kainuian education

than Mike had guessed so far. Apparently her instructors had more or less outgrown the notion that

experience is the best teacher even though she had been sent to sea while still a child.

That was a point to be noted; it might possibly fit in with the convergent-evolution language thesis he was

hoping to complete while on the planet. Different floating cities had been built by colonists from different

Polynesian islands, but generations of trade among them had gradually caused a blending of tongues that

was still far from complete.

Nothing much else had seemed surprising, either, during the time they had now been sailing. The weather

had been fine; there had seldom been more than a dozen of the world’s immensely tall thunderheads in

view at any one time, though of course the ubiquitous ionized haze hid such things long before one’s line

of sight reached the distant horizon. The thermals had not forcedMalolo to change her basically northward

course; they were routine. Even little ’Ao had needed no verbal orders; she obeyed a simple gesture from

the captain whenever the ship had driven into the hail column under one of them, darting over to the

collecting sheet and standing by to sweep the hailstones either into the drinking and bathing breakers

before they melted and absorbed too much carbon dioxide or, if there was too much of the material,

overside.

Only one other vessel had been seen during that time. Wanaka,Malolo ’s captain, had logged—and

reported to the others with some amusement, as though they couldn’t see for themselves—that it bore the

same name as their own craft, but was a single-hulled double-outrigger of about twice their own tonnage

flying the flag of Fou Savai’i and, like themselves, the “nothing to trade yet” pennant. Both adults seemed

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a little surprised that it was sailing at search speed; their own craft at the moment had itskumu’rau

deployed, since the suns were high and it was rare for any craft to miss an opportunity to top off on

oxygen. This of course could not be done at night, and at least some of each day had to be spent searching

for metal.

The name went into Mike’s mental notebook, too.Malolo meant “flying fish” in more than one classical

Polynesian language—on a planet that had no native bacteria, much less vertebrates, as far as anyone had

been able to find out.

The thing ’Ao had just seen and identified had been visible enough at half a kilometer, of course. The

weather was unchanged, with Kaihapa barely visible through the haze, hanging high in the western sky

and the suns nearly at the meridian. There was enough wind to move the ship at a reasonable clip, but not

enough to break the swells; and by now, with his improving reflexes, the seismic bumps and hollows in

the ocean surface were becoming merely a minor background nuisance to the passenger. They caused the

top of the mast to swerve and jiggle in a way that made him avoid watching it, but ’Ao typically held on

without apparent trouble and with her doll clinging to her shoulder, neither showing any sign of being

bothered.

Malolowas now hove to at the edge of twenty thousand or so square meters of rippling jelly floating just

under the surface. Wanaka, the vessel’s owner and captain, was still aboard to make sure it stayed there.

’Ao, Mike, and Keokolo had flipped their helmets on and gone overboard to harvest.

The first two were connected by a safety line, since the visitor knew practically nothing of Kainui hand

language, and vocal communication would have been hopeless below the surface even if helmets had

been unnecessary. Noise from the ocean bottom was continuous, and deafening, and often deadly in

overpressure. Mike had been told firmly to stay with the child, as though the connecting rope allowed

anything else. He watched her carefully. He already knew why she avoided the nearly black leaves, which

spread just at the surface and shadowed more than half the slimy stuff underneath, but he had been told

practically nothing about the actual mechanics of harvesting. The items they wanted, he did know, were in

the sheet of jelly itself, whose upper surface oscillated vertically under the push of the endless random

microtsunamis and more regular swells, varying from half a meter to something like two and a half below

that of the even more violently rippling water. Sometimes Mike found himself wading unsteadily on jelly,

sometimes swimming. The meter-and-a-quarter-tall child always had to swim.

It seemed simple enough. ’Ao’s thinly gloved hands groped over the jelly and every few moments found a

slit not visible to the man. Reaching a few centimeters into this she would feel around briefly and pull the

hand back either empty or grasping a black purselike object ten or twelve centimeters long that reminded

Mike of a shark’s egg case. This she would deposit in a circular basket being towed behind her, and

resume groping. ’Oloa, the doll, clung to her shoulder still, but ’Ao paid no attention to it; she was

working.

Keokolo seemed to be doing the same thing, except that the objects he gathered were clear and glassy in

appearance, and the container in which he placed them, unlike the girl’s, seemed to need no floats.

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